Discussion of public health and health care policy, from a public health perspective. The U.S. spends more on medical services than any other country, but we get less for it. Major reasons include lack of universal access, unequal treatment, and underinvestment in public health and social welfare. We will critically examine the economics, politics and sociology of health and illness in the U.S. and the world.

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Freedumb

Specifically, the freedumb to let your kids get seriously ill. I believe I may have mentioned previously that all but three states allow parents to opt out of mandatory vaccination for their children to attend school. Most of these allow only "religious" exemptions but of course anybody can claim to have one. Other just allow for "personal beliefs," which means there isn't actually any mandate at all.

It is a basic principle of medical ethics that people have to give informed consent for medical interventions. However, the situation with children is different. We don't let people starve or poison their children out of personal conviction or religious belief, and we don't let them refuse life saving treatment for cancer or other diseases either. People's rights to raise their children don't extend to abuse and neglect. That's a societal consensus. I see no reason why refusing vaccination should be an exception.

Well, maybe this is a little too subtle for some people to get. There's a lot of talk in both popular media and social science journals about the exotic health beliefs and practices of those strange foreigners. The anti-vax movement is indeed a white people thing, led by defrocked British physician Andrew Wakefield, former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy Jr., and consisting largely of granola eating middle managers. The commenters are not, as a commenter who is too obtuse to make it past my ban hammer thinks, "denigrating a whole class of people." They are making what we call a "joke." Maybe you have heard of the concept.

The answer is, for the most part, yes. There are effective child vaccination campaigns throughout Latin America. From Tapia-Conyer et al:

The adoption of the Expanded Programme on Immunization(EPI) has played a pivotal role in reducing mortality and morbiditydue to vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) in Latin America, with successes including the elimination of polio, measles and congenital rubella syndrome (CRS), and dramatic decreases in neonataltetanus and Hib infections [1–3].

Yes. It's important to note that said Latin Americans, whenever and wherever offered vaccines, are happy to get them. This is a dysfunction of financially successful, almost exclusively white people who mistake their expertise in their field of labor for expertise in everything else. Assclowns like this: http://judgybitch.com/2015/02/05/vaccinating-babies-nope/